


Before Verity

by kallooh



Category: Code Name Verity Series - Elizabeth Wein
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 15:39:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17046320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kallooh/pseuds/kallooh
Summary: After the war, Maddie, on a visit to Craig Castle, writes about Julie's war service.(Note: I haven't read Rose Under Fire so please forgive any incongruences with what happens in that book.)





	Before Verity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lyras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyras/gifts).



> How could we not be completely charmed by elegant, clever, funny Julie Beaufort-Stuart and her wonderful friendship with Maddie. I hope this lets you spend a little more time with them in the way you sought. Happy Yuletide!

Craig Castle  
Castle Craig  
Aberdeenshire

October 1947

I sit with a beautiful view before me. The mist from a “real rain” that Julie always happily exclaimed of, rises over the landscape. Lady Beaufort-Stuart, Esmé, urged me to come. I have visited often since December 1943. At first I was almost paralyzed with worry about how it would feel to be at Craig Castle, with Julie’s family around, after what happened. I needn’t have worried, of course. They understood the friendship that Julie and I had, and have always made me feel, really and truly, like family.

The weather was lovely when I arrived, perfect fall days. We spent a few days hiking around the estate. The boys showed me holes where foxes and other animals burrow. They have become used to living the countryside and are much less like the Glaswegians I met on my first visit to Craig Castle. Yesterday Jamie took them out to shoot grouse. I watched; I do not shoot guns any more.

Today began gray and moved into full on rain. I needed to be alone for a while and I think they all understood. Esmé brought me tea and a plate of biscuits, so generous when we’re all still living with rationing. 

I found the old notes and cards that Julie wrote when -- during her last days. I realized that while they were supposed to be about her, she was telling my story. And now I want to write her story. I’ll jot it in this book and then stash all of these away together for some future Beaufort-Stuart to find. 

Since that awful time in France I’ve learned more about her months in service. Careless talk costs lives but people who knew we were friends shared their memories of her, from her entire time in service. Over time I’ve been able to construct parts of it as it preceded and parallelled mine.

 

Julie entered into war service quite early. Britain declared war a few months before she started at Oxford. By the end of her first term she felt she had to support the war effort with her German language and other skills. She was one of thousands who signed up for the WAAF. She was made an officer, since her family was nobility, but she trained as a wireless operative the same as the rank and file. The WAAF w/ops went through the same training as the men, same stages and wpm requirements. Julie excelled just as she had excelled at other languages; Morse code was simply another way of communicating. 

Julie also received officer training, a few short weeks as there were many people to train in so many things that hadn’t been in great demand before the war. She took being an officer quite seriously. She had high standards for herself and those under her but she was also the kind of leader who would make sure everyone else had gone to the air raid shelter before going herself. As I experienced more than once, she did not stand for shirking or shrinking from what had to be done. When she gave you an order, you found yourself following it without thinking, even if it meant loading an impossibly heavy anti-aircraft shell into a gun you had no idea how to fire.

It wasn’t long after she started in the WAAF that others started calling her Queenie. She seemed to take to it, patting her perfectly placed chignon whenever she heard someone refer to her by the nickname. As she later told me, all of the requirements of the military - how to dress, where to be and when, regulation hair styles - were so much like boarding school that adapting was easy peasy. 

She was stationed in Cheshire (I think?) for two or three months before being sent to Maidsend. Her nickname traveled with her. 

That summer came a turning point. She reported for duty with the other w/ops, tracking planes via RADAR and mapping all the aerial activity. The door flew open, highly unusual in their quietly intense office, and someone called out, “who here speaks fluent German?” Queenie stood up and straightened her regulation jacket before raising her hand. “Sir, I studied in Switzerland for many years and then at Oxford.” A head jerked for her to follow, which she did calmly and elegantly.

Upon reaching the primitive air tower, Queenie focused on the job at hand, morphing herself into a German radio operator. Even as she talked the young German pilot into landing on a British base, she couldn’t help but notice the dark haired young woman who fed her what to say. Queenie thought, in the part of her mind not focused on talking the pilot down, that this young woman was quite intelligent and clear-headed in a situation that would have thrown many off kilter.

That night, after she retired and was plaiting her hair according to regulations, the air sirens went off. Queenie cleared the area before following the line of female WAAFs to the nearest bunker. She ducked through the door and immediately laid eyes on the radio operator from earlier in the day, who was clearly terrified. Queenie thought this quite at odds with the self-assured person she had witnessed earlier. She made her way over and asked, as if it were an ordinary question, if she might share the umbrella in this concrete bunker. 

A pale, wide-eyed face under dark curls turned toward her and nodded assent. “How clever of you to have brought an umbrella!” Queenie offered a lit cigarette and squeezed the hand not holding up the brolly. Slowly the other girl relaxed and warmed to her. 

(Julie later told me that she saw me sitting with the brolly and somehow knew we were going to be great friends. That I showed up later with an iced bun only confirmed her feeling.)

Neither of them suspected that the events earlier would form a sharp turning point in their lives. Queenie’s German skills and ability to assume any persona she wanted to be brought her to the attention of the base’s commander. As an officer she would have already met him socially at the officers’ club, but she did not make much of an early impression past seeming tiny and charming. 

The squadron leader had been keeping an eye out for anyone who might be helpful at other levels in the war machine. Queenie’s handling of the incident with the German pilot brought her to the fore of those he thought would be good candidates for the rather new Special Operations Executive, or SOE. Had she known how everything would turn out, I know Queenie would not have chosen for things to have been different at that point. She loved being part of the SOE and believed fervently (though not naively) in what she was doing.

Our chance/not by chance meeting at The Green Man pub with the man I called, and will continue to call, John Balliol, also changed my destiny. Queenie pointing out that I was a pilot accelerated moving me into a position where I could use my flying skills. 

Dusk is turning to darkness outside. I’m going to stop for now and return to Julie’s story tomorrow. 

 

This morning I rose from Julie’s bed - I have always stayed in her room when I visit the Castle - and dressed in the woolly jumper my mother knitted for me and other warm clothing. I ate a delicious cooked breakfast in the company of Jamie and the boys, and another of Julie’s brothers who arrived late last night for a visit. I returned to my cozy chair in this comfortable room with the lovely view. It’s hard not to compare it with Julie’s situation in her days at the Château de Bordeaux - only able to wear her clothes after trading (false) information for them, starved and dehydrated, tortured and tied to a chair with only Anna and that awful young Thibault with her. I feel a wave of sadness wash over me, that she wrote so much about me, abou us, under such dreadful circumstances while here I sit so comfortably. I know she found some solace in her writing. For me, finding out more of her time in the war and now writing it down, remembering her vivacious, engaging spirit, has eased my grief some.

So, the SOE. As Queenie wrote, she was seconded and trained in the SOE not long after I was transferred from Maidsend. Her letters to me arrived greatly marked up and blacked out. I do not know what my letters resembled when they reached her - patchwork quilts of words or symbols of normalcy with nothing censored. 

Among her training (of which I have only learned a small part) was hand to hand combat. I know this because she showed me some of the moves and made me practice with her those few precious times when we were together. She also learned, and did not share, how to pick locks and get into and out of places quickly and discreetly. I don’t think it was she who took my clothing coupons that one time, but it was someone trained in the same methods.

Queenie’s outstanding skill was always her ability to transform herself. She traveled around the country to interrogate captured Germans or insert herself into groups that were thought to be treasonous. In her initial training she was interrogated for hours on end. She adapted parts of what she had experienced to interrogations of enemies and double agents. Even in the few cases where she pushed to the edge, as when that terrible man nearly strangled her, she wrung out the information she was looking for nearly every time, and without physically torturing anyone. (Take that, Hauptsturmführer Linden. You would never have broken her without your nasty, brute methods of torture.)

Her work kept her traveling around Britain but the longer term goal was to place her in France. The only way to get there, of course, was by plane. I asked her once how she managed to make those parachute jumps, when heights was one of her top ten fears. “You inspired me,” she told me. “You told me to be Jamie, and I was him on that flight when we saw the glorious green flash. I became Jamie every time I had to strap that parachute on and leap out of the aircraft door. Only” - and she grinned - “I was a Pobble Who Has Toes.”

Now I’m crying. Even though when she jumped from the plane I was flying we could not speak, it was comforting and right to be near her. I miss her so much. 

 

I put this aside to take a walk outside, where the weather hovered between mist and rain. I walked and sobbed, and my tears ran down my face indistinguishable from the drizzle. After ten or fifteen minutes I reached a meadow and suddenly remembered a story Julie once told me (dramatically, dashing about the room re-enacting the parts) of recreating the Battle of Culloden with her brothers and visiting cousins. Her older brothers wanted her to stay on the edge of the meadow and play a lady cheering on her knight. Julie insisted she fight on the battlefield, and Jamie supported her. She fought as bravely as the rest of them, “after all Brodatt, I am SCOTTISH!”.

She didn’t write about it on her prescription pad or recipe cards, but Queenie made more than one other trip to France. Once she spent several days riding a bicycle around the countryside in the region next to Ormaie, delivering coded messages and flirting with Nazi soldiers when needed. A w/op I met who had transferred to a more sedate job told me late one night of how Julie’s ingenuity had diverted attention away from her hidey hole where she was sending the final messages of that mission. As a result a train was stopped in its tracks and supplies could not be sent in nor Jewish and other prisoners sent out for nearly two weeks. 

On another short mission she was on a team working to sabotage a depot where armaments and essential goods were stored. She served as a main lookout, ready to distract and deter anyone who might stumble across the job. The goal was not to draw attention to the area and not have to kill anyone, avoid unexpected dead bodies (unexpected meaning Nazis - dead French men and women, Jews, Gypsies and others were absolutely to be expected). Therefore a skilled manipulator was an essential part of the ring. I didn’t learn if Queenie had to bring out Eva Seilor, but I am certain if she wasn’t needed in that capacity she would have thrown herself into helping out in any other way she could. 

Then there was her last mission. Ormaie, the Damask circuit, plane crash, Château de Bordeaux plans, and a wrong turn, the wrongest of wrong turns. Oh Julie.

After the war I went back to the farm. Mitraillette and La Cadette welcomed me with open arms. We rode bikes around the countryside, though now we could ride freely and fearlessly. I think Mitraillette is a bit at loose ends without a resistance to lead. I haven’t learned what happened to Anna Engel but I haven’t tried very hard to find out.

So much happened in the year and a half before the war ended in Europe. I flew many more transports and took many more S chit flights. Fortunately there were no more crashes. I kept the boots that Jamie left for me and still have them. I wear them whenever I fly.


End file.
